


you're getting on my (optic) nerves

by untrustworthyglitch



Series: blind!klaus (hazy, but hopeful) [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blind Character, Blindness, Drug Use, Family Bonding, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 18:52:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18104369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untrustworthyglitch/pseuds/untrustworthyglitch
Summary: Klaus Hargreeves is many things. He's a former child superhero, an estranged brother, a drug addict, a frequent flyer at the local rehab facility. He can talk to the dead and never seems to die and loves a good thunderstorm.He's also blind, but he wasn't always.





	you're getting on my (optic) nerves

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so, first thing's first, i'm not blind. i have moderate-to-severe vision loss that can be corrected with prescription lenses, so i can see almost as good as a regularly-sighted person would, but i'm definitely not blind to the extent that klaus is in this fic. this means that, even though i did a lot of walking around with my glasses off to try and make sure i haven't written anything outlandish and horrible, i absolutely could have tripped up. for that, i'm extremely sorry, and if you notice anything offensive or poorly handled please don't hesitate to (kindly, pls) point it out to me so that i can apologize and fix it. 
> 
> if you'd like to see the kind of blindless klaus is dealing with, you can use https://simulator.seenow.org/ to simulate it. simply put in any location and set it to view with cataracts at about 50% severity. that's clearer than what things look like for me when i don't have my glasses, so that's the kind of vision loss klaus has, because that's what i would be able to accurately write.
> 
> now that that's all out of the way, you can find me at untrustworthyglitch.tumblr.com, where i post a lot of memes and like to scream about my fictional faves.

It happens at a rave, because of course it does.

One minute the entire world is pulsing lights, his hands skating over the tight leather pants of a man with eyes like clear blue swimming pools, blood thrumming with so much energy he can taste it like battery acid on his tongue. He’s high on life and about a dozen other things and for this one shining moment, nothing can bring Klaus Hargreeves back down to earth, not even the disapproving eyes of his dead brother watching him from the the corner of the abandoned warehouse.

One minute Klaus is surrounded by hundreds of people, teeming like a school of frantic fish, hearts beating in time to the deafening music and throats raw from screaming to be heard over it.

One minute Klaus is alive, alive, alive.

The next minute, the music cuts out and someone screams and there’s gunfire, he thinks, and suddenly he’s staring at a bloody girl in pink leggings who wasn’t standing there a minute ago. Klaus hits the deck. People run.

It takes three shoes in his ribs and Ben’s continued shouts for him to “Run, Klaus, you _idiot_ ” before he decides to get back to his feet. People are still scrambling and it’s a madhouse, a whirlwind, and Klaus has no sense of balance or up or down or anything, really, past the cocktail of drugs that might kill him by the time the night is through, if the people with guns don’t get to him first.

There are flashing blue lights and people screaming and someone yells, above the din, in the clearest voice Klaus has heard since he slid into the building.

“Tear gas!” someone yells, and then the room is full of smoke and anguished screams and Klaus can’t see. His eyes are on fire and he can’t breathe and he doesn’t know where the exit is and he’s so _drunk._

“Klaus, this way!” Ben shouts. Klaus doesn’t move. He’s too busy clawing at his face, trying desperately to get some relief. It doesn’t work. “Klaus!”

He follows, numbly, dumbly, because he’s out of it and he’s in _pain_ and Ben has never let him down, not once in his life, not once in his _un_ life. Ben is to be trusted and no amount of illicit substances or agony will change that.

The outside air is cool and brings no relief. Klaus collapses onto the grass and distantly hears sirens.

Warm fingers find Klaus’s wrist and someone says, “Damn, they really gassed you.”

He’s too busy losing touch with consciousness to reply.  


 

Klaus takes a long, long time to wake up and when he does, he immediately launches into a panic, because he can’t _see_.

He can see shapes, and colors, and light, but everything looks like he’s staring at it through a piece of sea glass, all fuzzy and soft and distant. He can’t get his eyes to focus. He blinks and rubs at them, but nothing he does will clear the film that clings to his eyes.

“Oh, you’re awake,” someone says, and she looks like a haze of pale blue and dark brown and a glint of silver where he thinks a name tag might go. Klaus blinks. Blinks again. The blue smudge does not coalesce into a human shape.

“What happened?” he asks. His voice is hoarse and his throat is raw. His entire body aches, but not the ache of withdrawal. No, his mind is more clear now that it’s been in a long time, and he doesn’t miss the irony that as soon as his head isn’t foggy, his eyes take its place.

“You were at an illegal rave about a week ago,” she says, and that explains why Klaus isn’t high and isn’t puking his guts out in a cold sweat. He slept right through the bulk of the withdrawal, which, honestly, is the right way to do it. Her voice sounds like she’s raising an eyebrow. It’s the disapproval in her tone that conveys it, and he doesn’t miss the way she sighs. “And some idiots decided it was the perfect place for a hate crime.”

“I got hate crimed?” Klaus parrots. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’s been roughed up in enough alleys to last a lifetime.

“Biological agent,” the woman says. “Like tear gas, but… worse.”

“Ah, that explains the eyes,” Klaus mutters

Her voice wobbles a bit when she speaks again. “We’ll have to do some testing to see if it’s permanent.”

So Klaus allows himself to be led through the crisp white hallways of the hospital, arm placed delicately on the elbow of the nurse. She takes him to a number of labs and introduces him to too many doctors to keep straight, all of whom want to take a closer look at his eyes.

“So interesting,” one man mutters. His breath smells like coffee and his tie doesn’t match his shirt, if the colors Klaus is seeing are accurate. “No one else survived the attack.”

Klaus thinks of how many times he’s been resuscitated after pumping a few too many chemicals into his bloodstream and says, “Yeah, that tracks.”

They have him look through lenses and stare blankly at letter charts. They shine lights into his eyes and drop chemicals into them to try and get them to react. At one point his head is strapped down and the man with coffee breath drops something into Klaus’s eyes to numb them so that he can get some kind of blunt instrument in there and poke around firsthand. Klaus hates it, hates the testing and the whispers he can hear from within the walls and the goddamn irony of it all.

All that was ever special about Klaus was his ability to see the dead. Now, he can’t see jack shit.

At the end of it all, the nurse in blue leads him back to his room and sits him down. She says a quick farewell and promises to be back, pressing a button into his hand that he can press if he needs emergency help. The door closes behind her and Klaus is left alone with his thoughts.

Well, his thoughts and his dead brother, who is slumped in the bedside chair with his head in his hands.

“Oh, cheer up,” Klaus hisses. He throws himself onto the hospital bed and reclines, hands behind his head, feet up.

“Klaus,” Ben says solemnly.

“Ben. Benny. Benjamin,” Klaus replies.

“Will you stop joking for one second? This is serious. You’re _blind_.” Ben stands and begins to pace, back and forth, and Klaus watches him lazily. It’s not like there’s really any other way for Klaus to watch anything.

“Yeah, mostly, but when you think of all the other fucked up shit that’s happened in my life, it’s not that bad. I mean, blindness isn’t that bad in comparison to, like, systematic child abuse and all the ghost shit. And the drugs. This is fine,” Klaus says.

“You’re more insane than I thought,” Ben mutters.

Klaus huffs a laugh. “Look at it this way, brother mine. I have my very own seeing-eye ghost right here!”  


 

The nice nurse comes back and brings a doctor with her. He’s tall, tall enough to block out the light when he looms over Klaus to take one last good look into his eyes. Klaus blinks and tries his very best to bring the man’s face into focus, but it doesn’t work.

“Okay. I have a handful of possible diagnoses, but we’ll need follow-up testing to really narrow down exactly what went wrong here. And I know this is scary, but there are plenty of treatment options that could really benefit you in the long run,” the doctor says. His voice is more of a drone, and it reminds Klaus of being lectured as a child, on everything from British war history to the religions of ancient Asian cultures. This is worse, of course, because the doctor is a boring human man, and not a biologically engineered chimp.

Over the course of the next ten minutes, Klaus learns several things:

  1. The chemical agent used in the warehouse attack is one never seen before by the medical community, and was 99.9% lethal. Klaus is the 0.01%.
  2. Klaus’s eyes no longer respond to stimuli. His pupils do not dilate. He can track motion, but light has no effect.
  3. This is permanent.
  4. Corrective lenses are more than likely not an option. Whatever it was that fucked up Klaus’s eyes, it’s not something as simple as an astigmatism, and for whatever reason, glasses won’t help. It’s a lot of medical jargon that goes way over his head.
  5. The doctor talks about Klaus more like an experimental subject than a human person, and that reminds him way too much of his dear old dad for comfort, and he wants out of this hospital at the next available opportunity.



“Basically, it’s the kind of vision loss you’d expect from mild to moderate cataracts, but this isn’t cataracts. This is something… unprecedented,” says Doctor Scientist, and it makes Klaus’s skin crawl to hear the breathless way he seems almost excited about getting his hands on the world’s only case of Whatever The Fuck.

“Can I--can I have a minute?” Klaus asks.

They leave Klaus to stew in his brand new diagnosis of _permanently fucking blind._ Well, not completely blind. He sees vague shapes, and colors, and he can still track movement, but he can’t read for shit anymore (not that he was every good at it in the first place) and no matter how close he brings his hands to his face, nothing swims completely into focus. He knows the words written there, but even when he strains, he can barely force the smudges into the familiar HELLO, GOODBYE.

As soon as their footsteps have faded down the hall, Klaus turns to Ben.

“Get me out of here,” he says. Ben sighs and nods exaggeratedly, and Klaus doesn’t even pretend not to be grateful for the gesture. He stands and crosses the room, arms held out shakily in front of himself for just in case.

“You need clothes,” Ben says, swinging a hand around to gesture towards Klaus’s hospital gown. Klaus runs his fingers over the rough fabric and toys with a string that’s fraying from the hem. It’s distinctly noticeable and uncomfortable and an eyesore besides.

“Yeah, get me out of this rag. I want my clothes back,” Klaus whines. He turns to the wooden wardrobe in the corner of the room and hopes with all his might that the hospital would have just hung his things where he could get to them. He yanks open the doors with a bit too much gusto and--fuck yeah. His leather crop top and orange leggings, just like he remembers.

“Shoes,” Ben reminds him, and Klaus laughs, wriggling his way into too-tight leggings.

“I wasn’t wearing shoes,” he singsongs. Ben heaves a put-upon sigh and heads to the door, Klaus trailing in his wake. They make it about ten feet before someone stops them.

“And where do you think you’re going?” he says. Judging by the light blue outfit, he’s probably another nurse. Judging by the silhouette he’s casting, his hands are on his hips.

“Checking out against medical advice,” Klaus says brightly. The nurse tries to argue, but Klaus is adamant, and within ten minutes he’s dictating his personal information to a receptionist, who fills out the forms for him to officially skedaddle.

Ben leads and Klaus follows and somehow they make it back to their apartment. Well, the apartment Klaus had broken into two weeks ago and which he had yet to be forcefully evicted from. It’s as good as his, in his mind. It’s got a roof and an old couch and only two holes in the wall, so it’s probably the best place he’s had since he left that stuffy old mansion years back. There’s even a can of soup on the shelf, which he clumsily opens and stabs a spoon into.

“What will you do?” Ben asks, and Klaus laughs, spoonful of cold soup halfway to his mouth.

“Uh, keep right on trucking? What, you think I’m gonna call one of our dearest siblings for help? Imagine that! ‘Hey, Luther, I kinda got blinded while high out of my mind at an illegal rave, wanna learn Braille together?’ Fat chance.” He shovels some soup into his mouth. He’s _starving_. All he wants in the entire world right now is a decent meal and something to take the edge off.

Speaking of--

“Hey, Ben?” Klaus asks, standing abruptly. He hurries to the little kitchen area and opens a few of the grungy cabinet doors. There, in the third cabinet from the left, tucked behind a broken piece of wood, is a baggie containing just the right amount of the best substance known to man.

“What?” Ben asks. He’s still on the couch.

Klaus wiggles the bag at him. “Wanna spot me?”

“I am _not_ helping you shoot up,” Ben says firmly, and Klaus stomps his foot and sighs dramatically.

“After all I’ve been through? You won’t do me one little favor?” There’s no answer, so Klaus huffily tosses the baggie back into the cabinet and rifles through a drawer instead. “Fine. Weed it is. I bet I have some oxy lying around, too.”

So life goes on. Anything with needles gets sold to the highest bidder and exchanged for things easier to smoke, snort, or swallow. Ben helps him with street signs and newspapers and not stepping on things he shouldn’t step on. He adjusts to blindness like he’s always adjusted to everything else: with a lot of whining and unhealthy coping mechanisms, but about as well as he can given the circumstances.

And then one day Klaus almost overdoses in an alley and gets shoved off to rehab, where they try to get him to open up about his trauma, and he’s not quite sure if they’re talking about his childhood or his dead brother or his missing brother or his drug use or the blindness. He cracks some jokes and does his time and checks out, thirty days sober, and immediately buys himself a whole new stash of brand new pills.

It’s after the next overdose, when he’s in an ambulance and Ben is shouting at him to pay attention to the tiny television, that he finds out his father is dead.  


 

He only goes to the funeral because he wants to see how much money he can get his hands on. His family is the same as they’ve always been, dysfunctional and angry, but with a few twists he didn’t see (ha, see, funny) coming. Luther is _huge_ and Diego doesn’t stutter and Allison has a new anger under her skin, like she’s furious with the world for the way her life is going. Klaus has listened to Ben read the recent tabloids. He knows about her divorce, and he knows she lost custody. 

Vanya is the same old Vanya, withdrawn and pale, and he hates how quiet she is. The others are all loud and boisterous and full of top-volume arguments. Vanya creeps like a timid little mouse and seems to blend into the drab gray walls of the mansion, and he almost startles every time she speaks.

Klaus is high as a kite when a hole opens up in space-time or some shit and spits their missing brother out, right onto the wet ground, in front of a pile of half his dad’s ashes.

“Five?” Allison says, incredulously, and Klaus is sure she’s wrong. He stares blankly at the short figure slowly picking itself up out of the dirt and waits for someone to tell her she’s crazy. Five is gone. Five is dead, nevermind that Klaus has never seen him, not once in all these years.

“Shit,” says the figure, and yeah, that’s Five, all thirteen years old and angry.

They go inside, Klaus stumbling slightly because the whole damn room is spinning, and end up in the kitchen. Five tells them about the future, about a world made of ashes and smoke. He says he’s old. He says he’s running out of time. He says he’s the only one that can stop it.

Klaus takes another pill and lays the fuck down to let the room spin itself into oblivion  
  


Shit hits the fan and it hits _hard_.

They get attacked and he gets kidnapped and surprise! It’s the Vietnam War!

His unit knows about his eyes, of course. It’s not a secret because it can’t be. Hargreeves can’t tie his own damn shoes, let alone aim a gun, but they’re miles deep in a jungle with no way out, so they’re stuck with him. His commanding officers threaten to abandon him and tell him in no uncertain terms that he’s going to be left for dead the instant he’s not of some use, but hey, it’s a living.

After all, who better to get information from than hordes of the dead, still riddled with the bullet holes that made them that way? And who better to wheedle the information from them than the Séance himself?

Klaus can’t use a gun because he can’t see. He trips over every vine in the entire damn jungle because he can’t see. He’s threatened with dishonorable discharge from an army he’s not even technically a part of, because he can’t see. There’s a reason the United States never drafted the legally blind, and it’s pretty straightforward. In a warzone, Klaus is basically nothing but a liability, and he would have been dead a thousand times over if not for his own personal guardian angel.

Dave is beautiful. Klaus doesn’t have to see him clearly to know that. He’s got rough hands and a laugh that sends Klaus’s heart into a frenzy, and in a way that’s endlessly better than the heart-pounding electric buzz of a new high. He’s kind when Klaus tells him about his shitty eyes and makes the funniest goddamn blind jokes Klaus has ever heard. He’s an angel in a green military vest and a devil with those damn hands of his and Klaus is so wildly in love with him that it doesn’t even matter that he’s stuck in a war he wasn’t even alive for. He’s the happiest he’s ever been.

“Someday, when this is all over, we’re gonna buy a farm,” Dave murmurs one night. His hands are warm on Klaus’s cool skin and he’s close enough that Klaus could probably make out his eyes, if it were light out.

“Can we get chickens?” Klaus asks. A smile dances on the edge of his lips and Dave captures it in a sweet, slow kiss.

“Anything you want, sweetheart,” Dave says. “We can get a whole damn roost of em if it’ll make you smile.”

Klaus kind of wants to cry, when Dave says things like that.

“And then we can--what did people do in the sixties? Go to the malt shop? Go parking?” He likes to say dumb things like that because it makes Dave laugh, and Dave delivers. If Dave is half as beautiful as his laugh, he’s gotta be the prettiest man on the planet, in this or any time.

“Yeah, baby, I’ll take you to the malt shop,” he whispers.

“And then we’ll feed my chickens, and make love on the rug by the fireplace,” Klaus murmurs. He can picture it in his head clear as day, and it makes him a little misty if he thinks for too long about how he’ll never get to see it that well in person. Oh well. He’ll still be able to feel it, and the important parts are Dave’s hand in his and Dave’s laugh in his ears.

They sleep curled together and wake before dawn to continue the long slog through what feels like endless miles of mud. They trek all day and by evening, there are bullets singing through the air and explosions overhead and Dave’s blood is all over Klaus’s hands and he can’t breathe past the gaping hole in his chest, a metaphorical one to match Dave’s physical one.

He doesn’t even wait for a medic. He knows Dave is dead because he hears him whispering in his ear, voice gentle and soft like it always was in their brief moments of peace.

“Go home, future boy,” Dave murmurs, and Klaus screams on a sob. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to go back to a family who never loved each other and an apocalypse they can’t stop.

But now that Dave is gone there’s nothing left for Klaus in the 1960s. There will be no little farm and no cluster of chickens to throw grain at in the blurry light of dawn. There won’t be any Christmases or Yom Kippurs or any anniversaries or birthdays. There will be no matching rings.

Klaus rips the stupid fucking briefcase from his million-pound army backpack and yanks it open, not caring where it takes him, and opens his eyes in 2019.

“Where the fuck did you go?” Ben roars in his ear, and Klaus heaves his way to his feet and stumbles off the bus to collapse on the pavement, sobbing into his hands for a love lost in a time that was never his to begin with.  
  


“Oh, Klaus, you’re home,” Luther says when Klaus drags himself down the stairs. His fingers are pruned from a bath that lasted long past when all the water was cold. There are still gunshots going off in the back of his head and he wonders if they’ll ever really go away. Probably not, he thinks. He doubts he can ever forget the taste of mud and the bone-deep exhaustion that’s only barely held at bay by extreme, round the clock terror.

For the first time in nearly ten months--or ten hours, depending on who you ask--Klaus might just go out and buy something illicit.

The entire family, sans both sisters, is gathered in their dad’s office. It’s not a cozy room, but there’s a fire crackling cheerily in the fireplace that brings some physical warmth to the space, though it’s not near enough to thaw the emotional deep freeze that plagues the entire mansion. Klaus remembers being creeped out as a child by the heads of large game that adorn the walls, and he’s almost thankful that he can’t see them clearly now as he shuffles into the room, giving Diego finger guns as he goes.

“What’d I miss?” he asks breezily, perching daintily on the arm of the couch. He’s still wearing his vest, but he’s paired it with lace-up leather pants, and he thinks it’s probably a pretty good look. Ben said it was, at least, and that usually what Klaus bases his fashion off of nowadays. If it makes Ben make some kind of distressed sound in the back of his throat, it’s a good look.

“The world is ending,” Five says distantly.

“Oh yeah, I remember,” Klaus mutters under his breath. Ben mimes kicking him, which is Ben-speak for _shut the fuck up, this is important_.

“How do we stop it?” Luther asks. He’s imposing, standing in front of the big picture window and blocking a majority of the light.

“Fuck if I know,” Klaus laughs, and almost jumps out of his skin when Luther slams his giant fists onto the top of their father’s old oak desk.

“Dammit, Klaus!” he shouts. Klaus tries to breathe past the smell of smoke and the taste of blood that suddenly clog his senses. God, he’s going to be dealing with this for a _long_ time.

“Uh, yeah, brother dear?” he says, aiming for lightheartedness.

“The world is ending,” Luther repeats. He’s breathing heavy. “The entire damn world is _ending_ and you can’t stay sober for a _day_?”

Klaus sits up straight at that, because he didn’t go through withdrawal in a foreign jungle in the middle of an active war zone to be talked to like that. He’s a fucking veteran. He deserves some respect, if the people who invented Veteran’s Day are to be believed.

“Hey! Fuck you! I’m sober!” he protests.

Luther makes a sound that manages to convey absolute, blinding rage, and Klaus always knew his brother had some anger issues but this is something new. This isn’t the kind of anger that had Luther lashing out at Diego during their father’s funeral, and it isn’t the kind of anger that kept him arguing with them all ever since. This is bone-deep, simmering rage that’s just starting to boil over, and it makes Klaus wish he was anywhere but here, facing it down.

“You’re staring blankly at the wall, Klaus! You’re not even fucking looking at me!” Luther shouts.

“Maybe that’s because I’m _fucking blind_!” Klaus roars back, and flees. He slams his bedroom door and throws himself on the bed, hot tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, and decidedly ignores the pounding footsteps that come to a halt right outside.

“Klaus?” Diego calls. Klaus swallows a scream of frustration and sits up.

“If you’re going to ask about my eyes, you can get fucked,” he says. It comes out hollow.

He’s been through a lot.

Slowly, Diego creaks the door open. Klaus can see Luther’s outline lurking in the hallway behind him, doing a very bad job at staying out of sight. He’d bet anything that Five is out there with him. He’s briefly glad that they didn’t just have him warp right through the door, instead opting to have Diego knock like a gentleman. Small mercies.

“Hey,” Diego says.

“Hey,” Klaus parrots.

“Talk to him,” Ben orders. Klaus waves a hand dismissively.

“So,” Diego starts. “What you said a bit ago. About being b-b-”

“Blind,” Klaus finishes for him, and he knows that’s a no-no, to finish a sentence for someone who stutters, but he’s at the end of his limited supply of patience and all he wants in the whole entire world is to drug his mind into an airy haze. He just wants some fucking peace and quiet. He just wants the whole damn world to _stop_.

“Yeah.” Diego is hoarse. He closes the door and comes to sit on the bed, and Klaus knows sure as anything that Five and Luther are pressing their ears to the door like they’re twelve years old and trying to learn each others’ dirty secrets.

“Yeah,” Klaus says softly. “Blind.”

“How… how blind?” Diego asks.

Klaus runs a hand through his hair. It’s clean for the first time since he was dropped right into the middle of Vietnam, but it’s too long and unkempt. No time for a barber out in the jungle.

“According to the one doctor I’ve ever talked to about it, it’s like… god, what are they even called. Cataracts? Is that the word?” He bounces a leg, so full of nervous energy that he’s pretty sure he could explode with it. He’s so tired and so keyed up and so, so done with this entire conversation. It’s like he’s thirteen years old and telling Ben he thinks he might be gay, but this is worse. This time, he doesn’t know how his brother will react.

“Cataracts,” Diego murmurs. “Jesus, Klaus.”

“He said it wasn’t like bad cataracts, but I can’t see for shit. I can get colors and shapes and motions, but I can’t read anymore unless it’s like an inch from my face. Not like I was very good at it in the first place,” Klaus says. He’s aiming for levity but Diego’s shoulders are slumped like he’s just been handed a devastating piece of news and Klaus is half grateful that he can’t make out the expression on his brother’s face.

“Do you have glasses?” Diego asks.

Klaus laughs. It’s humorless. “Whatever they did to my eyes, glasses won’t help. But I have Ben here to be my very own personal seeing-eye ghost, so I manage.”

“Who did what to your eyes?” Diego demands, and he sounds furious now, and maybe that wasn’t the right direction to take the conversation. It’s the overprotective instinct coming out, the same one that keeps him constantly berating Klaus to get sober, the same one that always had him watching everyone’s back but his own when they were kids.

“Some assholes,” he says. “I was at a rave and they gassed us. Just a good ole fashioned hate crime, you know how it is.”

There’s a sudden _bang_ from the hallway and Five swears loudly. Klaus startles and Diego crosses the small space to open the door. Luther is standing in the middle of the hallway, hand through the wall, struggling to pull it out while Five pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s all very comical, hilarious even, but in a very particularly sort of sad way.

“Oh, hey, Luther, you punched the wall,” Klaus observes astutely. “Did you punch a wall for _me_?”

Luther’s voice is rough when he replies. “You’ve been _blind_ for all this time?”

“I mean, yeah. Like six months now. Longer for me, you know how it is, but about six months, I think. Give or take. What even is time, really?” Klaus is rambling, he knows, but he doesn’t have to see it to know that he’s currently the focus of every eye in the room. And he’s usually in love with the idea of being the center of attention, but right now he just wants to shrink and vanish.

“Klaus. You’re blind.” Luther says it like it’s some huge revelation, like Klaus is being particularly dense for some inane reason.

“Yep! Well, not all the way. Like, halfway, maybe. I dunno, the doctor creeped me out so I didn’t let him get his grubby little hands on me for very long,” Klaus says.

“Stop joking and have an adult conversation about this,” Ben mutters, long-suffering like the good brother he is.

“Shut up, Ben,” Klaus says with a roll of his eyes.

“Ben is probably right,” Five says.

“He usually was,” Luther agrees.

“He still usually is,” Klaus says, and Ben laughs. The others chuckle lightly, and it breaks the tension. Things are falling apart. The world is ending, Klaus can’t see for shit, and Vanya is nowhere to be found, but their family is mostly together, standing in the doorway to Klaus’s childhood bedroom, and they’re laughing.

“So what now?” Klaus asks, breaking the easy silence.

“We need to find Allison,” Luther says. “She went to find Vanya, and she’s on her own. She could be in danger.”

“Roadtrip!” Klaus crows, and they laugh again. He thinks he could get used to this  
  


They pile into Five’s van and Klaus has to sit in the middle. Diego quips that it’s not like he needs to be by a window anyway, on account of his shitty vision, and Klaus pretends to be affronted for ten whole seconds before he breaks and laughs so hard he can’t breathe.

“It’s open season on blind jokes,” he declares, and they spend the ride joking and laughing while Luther steers. Klaus thinks that if he could meet the people who attacked the rave, he might just have to thank them for giving him endless fodder for self-deprecating humor. It seems to be the only thing really capable of bringing his family together, and he hopes the togetherness lasts.

Of course, it’s right when he’s starting to feel genuinely good that they stumble upon Allison, bleeding and half-dead, on the floor of the cabin.

The ride back is a tense one, Five working with the sewing kit they’d found in the cabin to stitch Allison back together as well as he can. Luther white-knuckles the wheel and Diego keeps swearing under his breath and Klaus stays out the way, occasionally fielding Ben’s comments.

“Can you stop hitting every pothole on the entire planet?” Five gripes when the van jerks unexpectedly.

“I’m doing the best I can!” Luther shouts. The group falls silent after that.

When they get back to the mansion, their mother frowns and gets to work. She hums as she undoes the sewing thread Five had put in as a temporary stopgap and pulls surgical thread neatly through Allison’s skin. They get a transfusion going and Klaus perches on a stool in the corner, wishing more than anything that they’d gotten there just five minutes earlier.

“She’ll be okay,” Ben murmurs.

When they finally get the confirmation that Allison will pull through, they disperse. Luther, Diego, and Five fuck off to god knows where. Klaus heads up the stairs, longing for his bed and a nap. And maybe a dose of whatever’s hidden under his mattress.

“Klaus, don’t,” Ben says firmly when Klaus goes digging.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Klaus retorts. “I want to take a nap and I don’t want nightmares.”

“Klaus,” Ben says, and then again when Klaus surfaces with a handful of pills. “Klaus!”

The pills are in Klaus’s mouth when Ben’s fist makes contact. He goes reeling, sprawling onto the cold wooden floor, face smarting. He sits up, clutching his cheek with a shaking hand, and blinks at Ben in pure shock. He doesn’t have to see it to know that Ben is doing the same.

“You just Patrick Swayze’d me,” Klaus says dumbly. “Holy shit, dude.”

“How did I do that?” Ben waves his hands around and tries to touch Klaus again, but they go right through, leaving only a tingle in their wake.

“I don’t know,” Klaus says. He reaches out a trembling hand and runs it through the space where his brother’s chest should be. Nothing. Just a spark, like he’d put on a staticky sweater and gotten a tiny zap from it. Static electricity.

They spend the next three hours sitting criss-cross on the bed, trying to give each other high fives, to no avail.

Diego pounds at the door when the light is starting to fade from the sky.

“Get to the basement,” he says. “Family emergency. Now.”

So Klaus goes, Ben trailing behind him, Diego leading the way. They end up in an elevator Klaus has never been in before, and when they step out, horror lodges in his throat like a huge wad of chewing gum.

Vanya is locked in a tiny room, beating her hands bloody against a thick glass window, and Klaus doesn’t need to see her clearly to know she is screaming.

“What the fuck is this?” he asks.

“She’s dangerous,” Luther says, like it’s something simple. Klaus can barely hear him over the sound of blood rushing in his ears. Vanya is closed up in a little cage and all Klaus can think of is a mausoleum full of the screams of the dead. It makes his hands shake. It makes his skin crawl. It makes him furious.

“So are the rest of us,” he half-shouts. He can hear the note of panic creeping into his voice.

“She’s more dangerous than the rest of us combined, anyone can see that!”

“Actually, Luther, I can’t _see_ fucking anything!” Klaus yells. “I’ll tell you what I _know_ , though. I know our sister is terrified out of her fucking mind, and shouldn’t be locked up like a fucking animal!”

Allison bangs a fist on the wall to get their attention. When she turns her notepad around, it says _LET HER OUT_.

“She’s dangerous,” Luther repeats. He’s adamant.

“Klaus is right,” Diego says. “We’re all dangerous.”

“She almost killed Allison,” Luther insists.

“Allison is standing right here,” Five says derisively. “I can’t believe I’m about to say it, but I’m with Klaus. We know the apocalypse is coming, and she could be a huge asset in stopping it. We just have to work with her. Not against her.”

“Ben would agree with me if he were here!” Klaus says.

“He’s right,” Ben mutters, and the room goes dead silent.

It’s only when Luther, voice trembling, says, “Ben?” that Klaus realizes what’s happening.

Klaus turns to look at his dead brother, and even he can see the way that Ben is outlined in a soft blue light. He glows, almost, bright against the gray walls of the basement room, and he’s standing completely still, hands up as though he’s looking down the barrel of a police pistol.

“You heard that?” Ben asks. He sounds choked up.

“Oh my god,” Diego whispers. “Ben.”

“Wait, can you see him?” Klaus says incredulously.

“You can see me?” Ben says, tears in his voice.

“We can see you,” Five confirms.

“Holy shit,” Klaus and Ben say in unison. Ben takes a step forward,

“Let Vanya go,” he says firmly. He opens his mouth to say something else, but Klaus is starting to feel faint, and that’s definitely not good. Like someone has flipped a switch, the blue light fades, and Ben is back to the human-looking smudge Klaus has grown accustomed to in the years since his untimely death. He sighs, visibly deflating, and puts his head in his hands. His shoulders shake with silent tears.

“You heard the man,” Klaus says. “Let Vanya go.”

Luther turns to look around the group, but every sibling holds firm, and he throws his hands in the air dramatically before crossing the room. He turns the handle on the huge metal door and Vanya tumbles out. She lands in a heap on the cold concrete floor and lets out a scream that simultaneously breaks Klaus’s heart and sends chills up his spine.

Allison is on the floor with her in a heartbeat. Vanya sobs into her shoulder and Allison rubs her back in broad sweeping motions, trying to soothe. Ben sits with them, hands hovering, clearly wishing he was corporeal. He waves a hand for Klaus to sit too, and Klaus obliges, folding his legs up and placing a hand on Vanya’s shaking shoulder. It only takes a moment for the rest to join them.

The Umbrella Academy sit together on the dusty floor of a long-forgotten basement and the world does not end.

**Author's Note:**

> and that's the story of how klaus hargreeves saved the entire world with a blind joke and a heartfelt sibling moment!


End file.
